We spent day one of our customer experience conference looking at ways to design and measure our customer experience actions. Day two took us a journey of how to get our people connected with customer experience and the pitfalls of using customer experience the wrong way.
Never by Chance: How Leaders Align Intentional Customer Experience to Accelerate Strategy
Chuck Feltz started the day by answering the greatest question about implementing customer experience in our organizations: if we only had 30 seconds to tell an organization how to get the best return on their dollar, what would we tell them?
Chuck's answer? STOP.
Stop doing what you're doing. Too many companies are spending more dollars in customer experience, than their efforts bring in.
Chuck goes on to says that the ESSENCE of strategy, is choosing to perform activities DIFFERENTLY or perform DIFFERENT activities than rivals. That's the first place we need to focus our customer experience development efforts.
We do this by asking ourselves:
-WHAT problem do we want to solve?
-FOR WHOM do we want to solve it?
-WHY is our solution the best option?
Most customer experience strategies fail, not in execution, but in return for investment.
We fail to get the return we want, because we haven't asked ourselves the right questions and developed our customer experience process to answer those questions.
You CAN'T achieve DISTINCT competitive advantage from things you do REASONABLY well MOST of the time.
Never build WOW experience when your CORE experience is bad. Build your core process, then get started working on adding the WOW factor.
Experience Matters: The Role of Brand in Creating Customer Experiences That Count
Peter Dixon with Prophet ran through a case study on how the Cosmopolitan hotel in Las Vegas went from failed real estate project with $1 billion dollars lost and nowhere near completion, to successful Las Vegas contemporary hotel by using customer experience to build a brand.
Peter's presentation shows that customer experience is about telling a story that creates feelings within customers.
It's not just done with human interaction.
Everything presented to the customer, people, location, objects, all contribute to the overall customer experience.
Peter left us with the following advice about how brand and the customer experience:
Before starting anything think:
what will be the touch points
what are the experience objectives
what will be the touchpoint priorities
what are the segments
what will be the inspiration
what will be done new/different.
The key is to create signature touchpoint for the customer. We need to create distinctions that stand above the rest.
Our customer experience solution has to be:
-Effective/Behavior Changing
-Feasible/Sustainable
-Unique/Memorable
Meeting the Expectations of Your Customers
Scott Hudler from Dunkin' Donuts discussed how brands can evolve to meet the needs of customers.
Not all customers are the same and effective brands know how to cater to the individual needs of their specific customer segment.
Dunkin' is not in the business of providing coffee for the whole world.
They know who their customer base is, and they create a customer experience to connect with their target audience, listen to their customers, and make changes as their customer needs change.
Scott reminded us that: Putting the consumer first is ALWAYS the right strategy.
Dunkin' Donuts implements this strategy by focusing on their Dunkin's Half-Dozen Customer Experience Rules:
1. The power has shifted to shifted to consumers.
2. Brand has to be build around customer insight.
3. Customer has to be the center of everything we do.
4. Create dialogue with your customers.
5. Data is powerful...only if you put it into action.
6. Problems happen, how you resolve is the key.
The Seven Deadly Sins (and Seven Heavenly Virtues) of Voice of the Customer Research
Howard Lax from GFK enlightened us to the seven sins we're all guilty of committing in our measurement and research at one time of another...and many times we do this without even knowing it!
The 7 Deadly Sins of Customer Measurement:
Vanity - We focus on easy metrics or just those that make managers look good.
Provincialism - We don't ask the questions that really matter.
Narcissism - We looking at experience from company's perspective, not customer.
Laziness - We think we know what customers wants, more than the customer.
Pettiness - We limit the scope of the problem. Or underplay the gravity of the problem.
Inanity - We lose sight of the consequences of measurements.
Frivolity - We fail to take action.
From Bow to Stern: How Royal Caribbean is Strengthening Guest Engagement
Kara Wallace from Royal Caribbean teamed up with Judy Melanson from Chadwick Martin Bailey to show they they were able to build a customer engagement program to measure the customer experience in Royal Caribbean's cruise offerings.
Kara showed us how Royal Caribbean sets the bar high by showing customers that they operate on a brand promise. Based on the brand promise to its customers, the brand then prioritizes all of its investments on those that make the biggest difference to the guest experience.
The cornerstone to maintaining a high level of customer engagement for Royal Caribbean comes down to closely monitoring what customers are saying and making constant changes to the process based on what customers are saying.
Measuring Customer Loyalty
Renee Pezzi and Kerry Whiting from Citizen Bank demonstrated how Citizen Bank is staying on top of customer needs and focusing their actions as an organization on those that build customer loyalty through their custom customer loyalty index.
The Citizen Bank Customer Loyalty Index helps the organization make sure that they are monitoring the needs and wants of the customers across all of the services and components that customers interact with. Renee and Kerry reminded us that when creating customer loyalty programs:
- One size does not fit all. Do what's best for your organization & customers.
- Make sure metrics link to desired business results and why!
- Sell the process internally, showing why!
- Always have ongoing assessment & improvement of metrics.
- Create great partnerships across business departments. You'll need it!
- Not all customer experience improvements cost $$$.
- Celebrate the quick wins in customer experience.
Integrating Voice of the Customer Into the Organization
Master storyteller Scott Swift from Hunter Douglas delivered a master presentation on the power of story telling to connect people with customer experience objectives.
Scott showed us how customer stories can show that we're using the data we receive and anchor it in the heads of the people.
The problem we often have with data is that we love it and would marry it if we could. The problem is that we transform it, manipulate data, play with it, and complicate it.
At the end of the day, stories are remembered much better, it's especially good if the story anchors to a specific piece of data.
We can be more effective at making customer experience organization changes if we:
- Train our people to show data.
- Explain what the data means.
- Show what we're going to do about the data.
- Determine the expectation from the process change.
- Measure the outcome of our changes against our expectations.
Consumers are faced with brand decisions everyday - from the browser they use when surfing the Internet, to their toothpaste choice and where they get gas. When did these brand choices begin? How early in the buying cycle did the consumer experience influence their purchase decision? This is a question we may lose sight of. But today, brands must understand key milestones and triggers in a customer's life (a baby shower, opening a checking account, or moving out on your own) to build a better brand promise. They must understand where and how customers get information and their experiences and how they use that information to make decisions about your brand. 
